Sunday, January 17, 2016

How to use Two Heads with One Cab (2 amps - 1 cabinet, a guide for dummies)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about how to connect two amps in the same cabinet.

First of all why would someone want to do it?

The reason is to have two totally different sounds: for example to have the clean channel of a Fender amp and the overdrive channel of a Marshall, or (and this problem is particularly felt by those who have a single channel head) to use different settings from two identical heads.

The problem of connecting two different heads into a same cabinet was particularly strong in the 80s, a time in which technology wasn't as flexible as today in allowing the players to find their tone easily, therefore to have a quality tone it was mandatory to use a big tube amp, and sometimes the most demanding players wanted (and still today wants) to use different tones from different amps in the same song.

There are many ways to connect two amps to the same cabinet, some more elaburated and some less, and remember that some method that you can find online can actually damage your cabinet or the poweramp of your head, so we will analyze today only the two most popular and straightforward ones:

- By using a stereo cabinet: stereo cabs has two separate inputs that for example (in the case of a 4x12 cab) drives 2 speakers each. You can connect one head to one of the stereo inputs and another one to the other (being very careful of the ohm impedence and of the maximum watt load that can be absorbed by the speakers) and plugging the guitar into an a/b switch that goes into the inputs of the 2 amps, so you can decide with it which amp to use.

- By using a tool made for the task, for example a Radial Headbone: with this box (there are various versions, according if you're using solid state or tube amps) we can plug the amps and the guitar directly to the box, and it can safely handle the power amp loads, and switch between the heads, going from its output into the cabinet. This solution (unlike the other one) will let us to use all the speakers in the cabinet, instead of just half of them.

Do you know any other safe and effective way to use multiple amps in the same cabinet? lLet us know in the comment section!